Unbelievably Accurate Homemade Yankee Stadium Model- Coolest Thing I've Ever Made

The original Yankee stadium, the stadium  Babe Ruth played in lives in my basement.   My father finally took me there and we walked down  one of these aisles here and as soon as I saw the   field and the grandstands a scoreboard I just fell  in love with this place. Without bragging I would   say this is by far and away the most accurate  model of this Yankee Stadium that's ever been   built. Every significant detail is reproduced I  spent about four years on this project probably   between three and four thousand hours. I figured if I'm going to spend my time doing this it   better be right, because there's always going to be  somebody out there that's going to tell you what's not right. A little bit neurotic probably but yeah  you have to be I guess to do something like this. I'm John Meeks and we're in Hillsborough New  Jersey. Businessman by day and when the business   day is over yes I like the paint and like  to build projects. Got pretty good at drawing   and self-portrait in a bathroom mirror upstairs . Took up oil painting mostly New Jersey scenes. I grew up in North Plainfield New Jersey which was   about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan. I originally  fell in love with this place because I had been   watching Yankee games on a 19-inch black and  white television and my father finally bought   tickets. It was the most cool thing I'd ever seen  in my life it was nothing like what I expected   it was a thousand times more than what I had  expected and then I started looking at things   and thinking Babe Ruth looked at that same thing  Lou Gehrig stood there Joe DiMaggio stood there   it was like it just at that point I'd been a  Yankee Zen and Mets fan at that point Yankees in 2009 they're going to be tearing down  Yankee Stadium it's not going to exist in   any form anymore the house that Ruth built  was going to be demolished building a new   stadium across the street which was very nice  but it wasn't the ballpark where this history   had happened and I felt Yankee Stadium needed  to be rebuilt in all its glory and that's why   I set out to make such a faithful reproduction  so it could give people an idea of what it was   like to actually be in that Stadium believe  me that place had a lot of atmosphere a queen   a hit a homer it was just a wonderful place to  see again the Acoustics the smells everything so the vast majority of this model is built  out of styrene plastic I found this company   called Evergreen that made strip stock they  made sheets and you can cut it into anything   you want and if you're creative and you have  a decent eye there's really no limit to what   you can do with this it's a great material for  modeling you can make it look like concrete you   know you can make it look like metal it's great  I don't want to even say how many dollars worth   of this stuff yeah let's say I needed to to place  a couple of steps somewhere you take the solvent   and starts to dissolve the plastic and then just  let that set up and in a couple of minutes you   won't get those two pieces apart and it was just  a matter of doing that over and over again many   thousands of times and these are very large  pieces compared to what most of what I was   working on the scale of the model is 1 120th a  tenth of an inch equals a foot and I made sure   that every significant detail is reproduced  properly and not try to cut Corners oh here   it is I don't know why I didn't see it this  is my architect scale this is actually broken   in half in pieces a couple times I've had  the repair it's been used so much you can   see how discolored it is there's no 3D printing  there's no replication it's all piece by piece now I don't know how many pieces it is  but I'm guessing north of half a million   I actually picked the date June 24th 1973 to  depict the stadium because my best friend and   I had gone in to see a doubleheader with the  Detroit Tigers and the Yankees won the first   game a really close game and in the second game it  was one to one in the bottom of the ninth inning   and Greg Nettles the third baseman hit a home run  into the lower stand back there and won the game   and everybody went crazy it was the high point  of the season so I figured I'll pick June 24th   I set out to make it exact and I sweat every  single detail on this ballpark everything is oh   100 precise to scale and I represented everything  reasonable that I could represent every single   light Tower it's all configured exactly the way  it was with exactly the right number of Lights   all of these are completely accurate and  there's actually a difference between this   one and these and you would never see it  but I I caught that difference I put in   these are football broadcast booths here  because the New York Giants played here I managed to get all the ads exactly the way  they were because Die Hard fans that had all   kinds of photos I needed everything to be as it  was that day all these signs are hand-painted   drawn and hand-painted in oil paint all the  flags which I have obviously in motion with   swirling winds I draw a flag on one side of  the piece of paper I'd draw a flag on the   other side of the piece of paper I'd saturate  it with glue crinkle it up and then have it dry   in place these electrical supply lines for the  the light towers all exactly the way they were   of course the ticket booths which a few of the  ticket booths actually still survive I think   one's in the Hall of Fame and another one turned  up not too long ago and of course this this looks   a little scary they had to put that up to hold  the scoreboard up never did fall down but again   the scoreboard all hand painted the entire  scoreboard the official long jeans clock out   here on the main gate I have it at 8 52 in the  morning there's nobody here yet you know I would   love to make sixty thousand people and put them in  here but that's not going to happen anytime soon the most common number I saw for seating was  65 000. well I don't know how many exactly   how many grandstand seats there were but it's  40 something thousand grandstand seats and 20   something thousand bleacher seating so you hand  painted all 60 000 seats one at a time yeah I   hand painted all all these seats one at a time  because there was no other way to do it and I   might add they've been hand painted blue a number  of times because I wasn't happy with the color I was able to come up with the proper  color because these are pieces of the   original Stadium unfortunately there's no  rule book there's no class you can take it's   trial and error which means it's a lot of  error I have a drawer full of outtakes here   all of this decorative freeze that  took me weeks to build the first time   after I'd been hanging for a few months  I decided I didn't like it anymore it all   had to be redesigned ripped out and done all over  again so that set me back about 10 weeks at least   all right here's one of them and of course it  would be the glasses off because I'm nearsighted   start out with a raw piece of plastic and I'd  build the rail first the top rail one at a time   lining it back up again absolutely  perfectly within the thousandths of an inch you're punching out the bottom radius with  a larger punch I would start the glue these   pieces down and then from there I would set  this up like this and cut the radius in but   there are multiple layers and ultimately  there's about 230 pieces took about six   hours for each one of these sections I spent  about four years on this project week nights   after work was three to four hours of course it  weekends I remember some Saturdays spending up   to 14 hours kind of painful to really try  and hit it up properly because you think   oh my God but I'm estimating probably  between three and four thousand hours oh I had a motto when I was building this thing it  says I'm going to find a way there's always a way   and I got there my wife and kids weren't crazy about all  the time I spent on it but they think it's   really cool and I'm sure they're  as glad that I built it as I am my Yankee Stadium model is the  coolest thing I've ever made foreign

Channel: Coolest Thing

Views: 18,240

Keywords: Yankee Stadium, baseball stadium model, cool thing, cool things, coolest, coolest thing, coolest thing ever, coolest thing i've ever made, coolest things, miniatures, model stadium, new york yankees, the coolest thing ever

Id: 4JZvTlhmoU0

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 24 2023